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Learn UI Design
14.11.2019
Erik Kennedy's course Learn UI Design is open for enrollment for less than a week. Disclosure, that link is our affiliate link. I'm linking to it here because I think this is worthy of your time and money if you're looking to become a good UI designer.
I think of Erik sorta like the Wes Bos...
Some CSS Grid Strategies for Matching Design Mockups
14.11.2019
The world of web development has always had a gap between the design-to-development handoff. Ambitious designers want the final result of their effort to look unique and beautiful (and true to their initial vision), whereas many developers find more value in an outcome that is consistent...
Finally, it Will Be Easy to Change the Color of List Bullets
14.11.2019
In my germinating years, the general advice was this:
<ul>
<li><span>List item</span></li>
<!-- ... -->
</ul>
li { color: red; } /* bullet */
li span (color: black; } /* text */
Not terrible, but not great. You're "resetting" everything...
Oh Hey, Padding Percentage is Based on the Parent Element’s Width
13.11.2019
I learned something about percentage-based (%) padding today that I had totally wrong in my head! I always thought that percentage padding was based on the element itself. So if an element is 1,000 pixels wide with padding-top: 50%, that padding is 500 pixels. It's weird having top padding based...
Thoughts After Looking at the Web Almanac’s Chapter on CSS
13.11.2019
Woah, I didn't see this coming! The HTTP Archive dropped this big "state of the web" report called Web Almanac with guest writers exploring data from 5.8 million websites.
Una Kravetz and Adam Argyle wrote the CSS chapter. The point is to squeeze a digestible amount of insight out of a mountain's...
An Early Look at the Vue 3 Composition API in the Wild
13.11.2019
I recently had an opportunity to try the new Vue Composition API in a real project to check where it might be useful and how we could use it in the future.
Until now, when we were creating a new component we were using Options API. That API forced us to separate the component’s code by options...
CSS-Tricks Chronicle XXXVII
12.11.2019
Chronicle posts are opportunities for me to round-up things that I haven't gotten a chance to post about yet, rounded up together. It's stuff like podcasts I've had the good fortune of being on, conferences I've been at or are going to be at, happenings at ShopTalk and CodePen, and more.
My talk...
Making an Audio Waveform Visualizer with Vanilla JavaScript
12.11.2019
As a UI designer, I’m constantly reminded of the value of knowing how to code. I pride myself on thinking of the developers on my team while designing user interfaces. But sometimes, I step on a technical landmine.
A few years ago, as the design director of wsj.com, I was helping to re-design...
When to Use SVG vs. When to Use Canvas
12.11.2019
SVG and canvas are both technologies that can draw stuff in web browsers, so they are worth comparing and understanding when one is more suitable than the other. Even a light understanding of them makes the choice of choosing one over the other pretty clear.
A little flat-color icon? That's...
scrapestack: An API for Scraping Sites
12.11.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
Not every site has an API to access data from it. Most don't, in fact. If you need to pull that data, one approach is to "scrape" it. That is, load the page in web browser (that you automate), find what you are looking for in the DOM, and take it.
You can do this...
A Super Weird CSS Bug That Affects Text Selection
12.11.2019
You know how you can style (to some degree) selected text with ::selection? Well, Jeff Starr uncovered a heck of a weird CSS bug.
If you:
Leave that selector empty
Link it from an external stylesheet (rather than <style> block)
Selecting text will have no style at all....
From FUD to FOMO – China State Newspaper Says Bitcoin Is ‘Successful’
12.11.2019
A major Chinese daily has published an article about Bitcoin. The publication describes the first cryptocurrency as a successful application of the blockchain technology. It provides its readers with the basics they need to know about Bitcoin and highlights some of its main characteristics. Also...
Pac-Man… in CSS!
11.11.2019
You all know famous Pac-Man video game, right? The game is fun and building an animated Pac-Man character in HTML and CSS is just as fun! I’ll show you how to create one while leveraging the powers of the clip-path property.
See the Pen
Animated Pac-Man by Maks Akymenko (@maximakymenko)
...
Disabled buttons suck
11.11.2019
In this oldie but goodie, Hampus Sethfors digs into why disabled buttons are troubling for usability reasons and he details one example where this was pretty annoying for him. The same has happened to me recently where I clicked a button that looked like a secondary button and... nothing happened....
Two-Value Display Syntax (and Sometimes Three)
8.11.2019
You know the single-value syntax: .thing { display: block; }. The value "block" being a single value. There are lots of single values for display. For example, inline-flex, which is like flex in that it becomse a flex container, but behaves like an inline-level element rather than a block-level...
Diana Smith’s Pure CSS Artwork “Lace”
8.11.2019
Diana is at it again with her absolutely unbelievable CSS paintings. This latest one is called Lace. Past paintings are Francine, Vignes, and Zigario.
She wrote for us last year if you'd like a little insight into her thinking.
Andy Baio looked at the painting in a variety of older...
Working with Fusebox and React
8.11.2019
If you are searching for an alternative bundler to webpack, you might want to take a look at FuseBox. It builds on what webpack offers — code-splitting, hot module reloading, dynamic imports, etc. — but code-splitting in FuseBox requires zero configuration by default (although webpack will offer...
Weekly Platform News: Web Apps in Galaxy Store, Tappable Stories, CSS Subgrid
8.11.2019
In this week's roundup: Firefox gains locksmith-like powers, Samsung's Galaxy Store starts supporting Progressive Web Apps, CSS Subgrid is shipping in Firefox 70, and a new study confirms that users prefer to tap into content rather than scroll through it.
Let's get into the news.
Securely...
Location, Privilege and Performant Websites
7.11.2019
Here’s a wonderful reminder from Stephanie Stimac about web performance. She writes about a recent experience of moving to an area with an unreliable network and how this caused problems for her as she tried to figure out what was happening during a power blackout:
Assuming all of your customers...
Query JSON documents in the Terminal with GROQ
7.11.2019
JSON documents are everywhere today, but they are rarely structured the way you want them to be. They often include too much data, have weirdly named fields, or place the data in unnecessary nested objects. Graph-Relational Object Queries (GROQ) is a query language (like SQL, but different) which...